The Distillation

National and international policies should respect the human rights of individuals who chose to use psychedelics as a spiritual, personal development, or cultural activity.

In 2016 the UN will have a special meeting in New York to set the future for international drug policy. Former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan and the Global Commission on Drug Policy say that we must “Ensure that the international conventions are interpreted and/or revised to accommodate…decriminalisation and legal regulatory policies.”

“We are not claiming that no individuals have ever been harmed by psychedelics,” says author Matthew Johnson, an associate professor in the Behavioral Pharmacology Research Unit at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland.

“Anecdotes about acid casualties can be very powerful — but these instances are rare,” he says. At the population level, he says, the data suggest that the harms of psychedelics “have been overstated”.

On an April Monday in 2010, Patrick Mettes, a fifty-four-year-old television news director being treated for a cancer of the bile ducts, read an article on the front page of the Times that would change his death.

His diagnosis had come three years earlier, shortly after his wife, Lisa, noticed that the whites of his eyes had turned yellow. By 2010, the cancer had spread to Patrick’s lungs and he was buckling under the weight of a debilitating chemotherapy regimen and the growing fear that he might not survive.

From the Article:Trip Treatment: Research into psychedelics, shut down for decades, is now yielding exciting resultsPublished In: New Yorker MagazineOriginal Link: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/02/09/trip-treatmentArt by: AngMoKio - Own work, CC BY-SA 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2812210April 2nd, 2015

"Dr. Michael Bogenschutz, a psychiatrist at UNM School of Medicine, said he is studying the use of psilocybin — the active psychedelic compound in many species of hallucinogenic mushrooms — for the treatment of alcohol abuse and addiction".

The study of this use of psilocybin is still in its early stages, but Bogenschutz said that if future research observes positive results, psilocybin may become a medication that could help treat alcohol dependence.

ECfES

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